Shared services plan would benefit New Hartford, Rome

Wednesday

The city of Rome and town of New Hartford are expected to both benefit financially from a plan to share information-technology services, city and town leaders said.

The city of Rome and town of New Hartford are expected to both benefit financially from a plan to share information-technology services, city and town leaders said.

For the arrangement to become a reality, an intermunicipal agreement still needs to be approved, but once it is established, it could lead to other municipalities coming on board, Rome Mayor James Brown and New Hartford town Supervisor Patrick Tyksinski said.

The plan works for Rome and New Hartford either way, but if more municipalities get involved, there could be a greater savings, they said.

“Hopefully, what’s going to happen with this is we’re going to expand it,” Brown said, before referencing the importance of consolidation efforts. “We can no longer operate the way that we have.”

The intermunicipal agreement is currently in the hands of legal officials for the city and town, and it would require approval from both sides.

The agreement

A few years ago, Rome began contracting out its information-technology services – saving more than $300,000 by privatizing the work with M.A. Polce Consulting, which is headquartered at the Griffiss Business and Technology Park in Rome, Brown said.

Rome pays M.A. Polce Consulting about $12,000 per month for the work, company President Michael Polce said.

The company does day-to-day information technology work for Rome, design work, law-enforcement technology work, vendor operations and more, Polce said.

“We are the IT department,” he said. “That’s as simply as I can put it.”

The new plan is for New Hartford to also use M.A. Polce Consulting for its information-technology work. By New Hartford paying Rome for the shared service, New Hartford should save about 25 percent from the amount of money it previously paid another information-technology company on its own, Tyksinski said.

“I think it’s a win-win situation for both of us,” Tyksinski said.

For Rome, the benefit is the revenue the city will generate by getting paid by New Hartford, Brown said. Rome has the equipment that can make the plan work, he said.

“This is cutting edge,” Brown said.

Details of how much New Hartford would pay Rome were not available, and Brown and Tyksinski said they plan to conduct a formal announcement when more progress is made on the agreement.

More involvement, more savings

Through the agreement, M.A. Polce Consulting would be taking on additional work even though the town will be paying the city – not the company, Polce said.

“We’re absorbing that to a large degree,” Polce said, adding that the company is doing so because it supports the local efforts to consolidate services. “This is what has to happen.”

The company is ready to start doing the work whenever the agreement is approved, Polce said. There are increased opportunities for savings as the plan moves forward if the municipalities can share servers and conduct licensing purchasing in bulk, he said.

New Hartford’s needs are similar to Rome’s, and the agreement can easily expand to a larger scale if more municipalities show interest, Polce said.

“The model will perform best as we get towns and villages and cities involved,” he said.

Brown said he sees the number of municipalities involved continuing to grow, and he hopes eventually it could even get to a point where it is consolidated with Oneida County and taken over by the county.

The possibility of the involvement expanding didn’t factor into New Hartford’s interest in the plan – the reason was just because the town will save money, Tyksinski said. But if additional municipalities can get involved with sharing the services in the future, that’s a good thing, he said.

“The more people that can get in on this, the more savings I think everybody will see,” he said.

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